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Dr Kate Maclean

Profile

Kate is a feminist geographer who explores the way that development, economic and financial theories and policies recreate, challenge and impact upon gendered concepts, identities and experiences. She joined the department in September 2013, and has an interdisciplinary background, with degrees in Philosophy (MA) and Women’s Studies (MSc, PhD). Kate has lived and worked in Paris, Bangkok and Barcelona, and conducted research in Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Mali and Burkina Faso.

She has worked on microfinance, rural livelihoods, the financial crisis, contraband and urban regeneration, mostly with a focus on Latin America. She has published in various journals, including Antipode, Development and Change and Gender, Place and Culture, and has a new book out with Palgrave – ‘Social Urbanism and the politics of violence: the Medellín Miracle.’ Her latest project is entitled ‘El Alto Millionaires: Processes of displacement, identity and urban change in the Global South’. Building on her previous work in La Paz, Bolivia, and its satellite city El Alto, this project will explore how patterns of urban accumulation, dispossession and displacement in these locations challenge the way that such processes – often summarised by the word ‘gentrification’ – are generally conceived. This project is supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship, 2015-17.

Research interests

Kate’s latest book is an exploration of the politics of ‘The Medellín Miracle’. Medellín, Colombia, used to be the most violent city on earth. In recent years, however, it would appear that investments and regeneration projects targeted at the poorest, most marginalised areas of the city, as well as innovative public transport projects, have resulted in a sharp decline in violence. Whereas in 1993 the homicide rate was 375 per 100,000 population, the current statistics are now comparable with major cities in the US, and the murder rate in Medellín for 2012 was 52 per 100,000. This book examines the claims made about the 'Medellín Miracle' by looking at the political processes behind the policies that have become known as 'Social Urbanism'. The central contention of this book is that violence – in its many forms – needs to be understood as a political issue. The changes in the political fabric in Medellín and the transformations in terms of urban development policies were far more complex than the term 'miracle' suggests.

In 2010 Kate conducted a project on the gender dynamics involved in informal markets in contraband used clothes in the city of El Alto. The global trade in used clothes is controversial worldwide. In Bolivia, political debate on the trade has demonstrated tensions inherent in the government’s ‘post-neoliberal’ agenda of nationalisation, protection of cultural identity and well-being of the poor in an increasingly liberalised and globalised market place. The trade in used clothes from overseas threatens national production and the sale of western labels in markets dominated by indigenous women challenges the gendered identity politics upon which social inclusion in Bolivia is predicated. This work was supported by the British Academy and has been published in Gender, Place and Culture.

Kate’s doctoral work on microfinance in Bolivia examined the income generating strategies and skills which women participating in microfinance employ as their activities take them from rural communities to the more competitive towns and cities. Their use of credit and savings facilities and resistance to the financial discipline encouraged by microfinance institutions and use of the illuminates the gender biases involved in predominant concepts and policies in development theory and praxis. Kate’s work on microfinance can be found in Antipode, Development and Change, and the Journal of International Development, as well as Sylvia Chant’s International Handbook of Gender and Poverty. She is currently working on an edited volume for the School of Advanced Research, Santa Fe NM, Press with Dr Milford Bateman.